Archive

Research Findings

Mothers have been shown to receive lower pay than childless women across industrial countries. In the United States, research based on women born in the 1960s or earlier indicates that mothers earn 4-5% less per child, compared to childless women with similar education, length of work experience, and frequency of employment interruptions.

The pay gap between mothers and non-mothers who are otherwise similar—the so-called “motherhood wage penalty”—has been shown to differ in size for women with different marital status, skill level, and age. We know relatively little, however, about how the characteristics of occupations shape the degree to which women are penalized for having children. Occupations, by design, differ in their required training, schedules, and activities. The different work conditions and requirements across occupations may empower or hinder mothers, thereby narrowing or widening the pay gap between mothers and non-mothers.

How exactly should occupational characteristics affect the extent of the motherhood wage penalty? The answer to this question depends on why mothers receive lower wages than childless women in the first place. Because mothers face greater family obligations and time constraints, they may not be able to meet job demands the way childless women can—e.g., being very flexible in making work-related plans—resulting in mothers’ worse job performance and lower pay. If work-family conflict largely accounts for the motherhood wage penalty, then this penalty should be greater in occupations that enable workers less autonomy and more teamwork, as the job performance for such occupations depends more on workers’ ability to perform a certain task at a certain time. Because more autonomous occupations enable greater decision-making latitude, which is thought to lessen job strain, they may also decrease the work-family conflict mothers frequently face, thereby reducing mothers’ wage disadvantage. Likewise, because occupations that require workers to compete intensely with peers tend to be more stressful and time-demanding, mothers in more competitive occupations should be especially likely to suffer from job strain and work-family conflict, resulting in a greater motherhood penalty.

Occupational licensure creates a right to practice, legislatively carving out tasks that can only be performed by authorized practitioners and reserving an occupational title for the sole use of those practitioners. The authority to practice can be obtained only from the state, and unauthorized practice can result in criminal and civil penalties.

Over the past few decades, occupational closure – most often through occupational licensing – quietly became the norm for a broad swath of American occupations. Where only a small set of ‘traditional’ professions once determined entry through regulation, today the practice governs a much wider range of occupations, from doctors to engineers, carpet layers to massage therapists, agricultural inspectors to wilderness guides, and fortune tellers to legal document assistants.

The most substantial growth in occupational licensing has been in blue-collar occupations.

Many occupational licensing boards are made up of senior professionals in that field. Thus, architects draft guidelines for other architects; standards for hairdressers are styled by instructors in cosmetology schools; and frog farmers must leap over barriers imposed by fellow amphibious agriculturalists.

Because not every worker who wants a license can obtain one, licensure is thought to raise wages for licensed workers by artificially restricting supply. If true, this would mean that licensed workers benefit at the expense of consumers.

Profound changes in paid employment have unfolded in recent decades, with serious consequences for millions of workers whose jobs, careers, and family lives have are been exposed to rising levels of risk. Though much of the attention has focused on the advanced capitalist societies, precarious work has also grown through Asia and much of the global south.

Involved here is the spread of work that is uncertain or insecure, in which risks are shifted from employers and governments to workers, and in which workers lack the legal protections and benefits that the standard work arrangement once offered.

Familiar examples of precarious work include temporary and contract work, but growing rapidly now are jobs in the “gig” or on-demand economy, “bogus” self employment in which workers are independent in name only. Working under these conditions can over time have adversely affect individuals, shaping workers’ trajectories in ways that can inflict lasting harm.

Workers often suffer income insecurity. They cannot know when they will be working, if at all. They have little or no access to job training or sick days. And they often feel like outsiders while on the job. Societal effects can also accumulate, as when the weakening of economic attachments drives the social and political instability that has surfaced in recent years, at times seeming to threaten the foundations of liberal democracy itself.

What is known about these developments? One set of answers can be found in Precarious Work, our just-published collection of original papers on the topic.

In the recent news several instances of sexual harassment and sexual abuse have been brought to light. These cases of sexual abuse highlight how powerful men, such as Harvey Weinstein,Kevin Spacey, and Matt Lauer can use their positions to exploit, harass, and cause harm to others.

There has been less focus on how these individuals were made powerful and protected by institutions that both enabled them to harass and gave them the tools through which they could cause harm. In my research, I explore the intersection between bureaucracy and harassment in the context of the United States military.

Earlier this year “Marines United” was identified as a closed Facebook group where over 30,000 servicemen shared nude photos of servicewomen. Many of the comments following the identification of “Marines United” asked whether the military had policies and regulations as well as avenues to prosecute servicemembers for online activities. We often understand policies, rules, and regulations as ways to prevent, address, and punish those who might perpetrate sexual harassment and abuse.

However, my research shows that it is also important to recognize the discretionary power that individuals have in interpreting, carrying out, and implementing organizational rules, policies, and regulations. The interplay between organizational polices, workplace climate, and individuals in power can lead to sexual abuse in the workplace.

In a recently published article, I use the term “bureaucratic harassment” to explain workplace harassment where bureaucracy is both the tool that perpetrators use to harass, as well as their source of power over others in the organization.

How is socio-economic advantage and disadvantage passed down from parent to child? This is a central question for sociologists and policymakers alike. No one denies the vital role that education plays in this process. However, sociologists have long argued that there is a persistent ‘direct effect of social origins’ on occupational attainment which cannot be accounted for by education. This residual direct effect of social origins on occupational destinations has acquired the status of a stylized fact within sociology, sometimes simply referred to as ‘DESO’.

Our recent study challenges the consensus on this issue. We ask, could the direct effect of social origins be an artefact of using overly crude measures of education?

If you want to get a top social class position, it certainly helps to be a university graduate. But simply having a degree may not be enough. It may also matter what subject your degree is in, and whether you attended a prestigious university. Yet most studies of social mobility have not accounted for these educational distinctions, which are likely to matter for access to top jobs nowadays.

We set out to provide a refined account of the educational pathways from origins to destinations, using data from a nationally representative sample of over 17,000 people born in Britain in 1970, using the 1970 British Cohort Study. The BCS70 is longitudinal, meaning that the same group of people have been followed up over time. The BCS70 study members have been followed from birth, when their parents were interviewed, to mid-life. The study is ongoing, and the cohort members are interviewed every few years.

“Since Walmart arrived [In Chile] lunch has been bad. Before, with D&S, they used to give us an appetizer, main dish, and dessert. Now they barely give us a main dish. That’s why we had a job action and now the food has once again improved.” Lorena (Walmart Worker)

To a U.S. audience, it might seem strange that a worker would be complaining about the food they receive in a workplace, especially if that workplace is Walmart. Yet in Chile, large employers like Walmart are required by law to provide workers with lunch or dinner, depending on their shifts. The law however does not specify what kind of meals they have to provide.

Changes to the quality and quantity of food were experienced by workers as a lack of respect. The firm that Walmart bought in 2009, D&S provided higher quality food, and more options. Walmart, in its global quest to reduce costs, tried to offer poorer quality food and less of it, but their strategy backlashed – workers walked out.

How is it that Walmart workers in Chile are so emboldened, especially in contrast to Walmart workers in the U.S. who experience increasingly precarious employment?

Parents want what is best for their kids. Under what circumstances might that mean giving them Cheetos?

Consider two mothers.

Jane is an upper-middle class mother. Her son, Charlie, is constantly asking her for Cheetos. Jane thinks Cheetos are unhealthy, so she goes out of her way to go to Whole Foods to buy their hydrogenated-oil-free alternative. Charlie doesn’t find them quite as salty and delicious, but Jane feels good about teaching Charlie that his preferences need to be balanced with health considerations.

Across town, Paula, a low-income mother, is facing the same request from her son, James. James also loves Cheetos. Although Paula knows that she is short on the cable bill this month, she also knows that the change in her pocket won’t cover the bill anyway. So she puts that money toward buying James his snack of choice. Paula doesn’t see Cheetos as the healthiest option, but she feels happy about being able to give James exactly what he asked her for.

In many ways, Jane and Paula are alike. They both want their teenage sons to be healthy and happy. They both view feeding their kids as a way of expressing care and being a good mother. But how they feed their kids differs, with Jane’s approach emphasizing self-restraint and Paula’s emphasizing gratification. This discrepancy in approaches is influenced by their access to money and grocery stores; but it is also fundamentally shaped by the class-inflected symbolic meanings that parents like Paula and Jane attach to food.

These symbolic meanings are the focus of my recent study. Through interviews with 160 parents and adolescents and observations of families across socioeconomic status (SES), I found that parents’ different feeding strategies in part reflected the different symbolic meanings that food held for them.